Call of Duty’s Nuketown map is a popular paintball course in real life

Nuketown in real life makes for some explosive fun

The Call of Duty franchise has had some truly iconic maps over the years, but few are more famous than Nuketown, which was first introduced in Call of Duty: Black Ops. It’s well-known and loved for its close quarters, fast-paced gameplay, and it’s seen multiple iterations over the course of the series. Regardless of how the aesthetics of the map change, players know the layout like the back of their hands, which is why it’s so intriguing to see the map laid out in real life as Nuketown paintball.

Apparently, the Nuketown map has inspired quite a few real-life replicas at paintball parks, including one pictured in a popular Reddit post. The photo shows an overhead view of the map, which includes two houses, a large truck and bus, and a couple of cars scattered about. It’s pretty uncanny to see in real life when you know the area so well, down to the sightlines.

This guy made the call of duty map "nuke town" as his own paintball field
byu/QAnnihilateQ64 ingaming

While the picture from the Reddit post is the Xtreme Paintball Park in the St. Louis Metro area, the real-life Nuketown map has been a trend among outdoor recreational parks for years now.

In 2013, Tippmann, a paintball gear company, sponsored an event dubbed “Nuketown 2013” in East Dundee, Illinois that featured the map’s layout. Another park called Xtreme Paintball (which is not associated with the aforementioned park of the same name, as far as well can tell) started advertising a Nuketown map back in 2016. Activision even hosted their own live Nuketown paintball event at The Forum in Los Angeles the same year. Other maps like Shipment have also gotten the live-action treatment.

The list could go on — point is, everyone can agree that it’s pretty badass to do paintball on a real Call of Duty map, and there are dozens of parks that have posted up the real thing to prove it. I’ve never played a round of paintball in my life, but I have clocked dozens of hours on the Nuketown playlist in CoD, so I’m suddenly itching to adorn some camo and get bludgeoned by some spheres full of paint.